Wade Davis gives a fascinating talk at the 2012 Telegraph Hay Festival on the
quest to conquer Everest in 1924.

When a commentator at the forthcoming Olympics utters the inevitable cliche about competitors "pushing themselves to the limit", spare a thought for George Herbert Leigh Mallory.

The English mountaineer, who died during an attempt to climb the North Face of Mount Everest in June 1924, had earlier been so oxygen-deprived that he had coughed up the entire lining of his throat - and still carried on. Yuk.

This and other remarkable tales were part of a fascinating talk by Canadian anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis as he talked about his book Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest at the 2012 Telegraph Hay Festival.

Even for spectators who aren't especially knowledgeable about climbing, the talk was crammed with interesting tidbits. Davis said that the climbers in the 1920s regarded the use of oxygen "unsporting"; George Finch, in 1922 expedition invented a jacket of his own design filled with eiderdown. His fellow climbers ridiculed his coat until they realised he was the only one staying properly warm.

Davis talked about Sandy Irvine "a mechanical savant who could take apart and fix anything" and said he was not part of the Cambridge gang who saw homosexuality as part of the "experimental culture". He was more likely to have been bedding his fellow undergraduates' mothers, joked Davis.

The speaker also touched on the way that the Polar expeditions mirror the decline of the British empire and said that the effects of the First World War, for youngsters seeing so much carnage and death, cannot be underestimated on the psyche of the climbers and their rational acceptance of risk and death. "War changed the gestalt of his death." And yet, reflected Davis, they represented a lost age of "decency, honour and grit".